AWS Partner Story: The Honest Company

How does a company provide the best possible service to its customers while continuously looking for efficiencies to impact its bottom line? It can be challenging to master the difficult balance between the two. The Honest Company wanted to mine deeper insights into its subscriber base, but with the tools at hand, they were challenged in getting to the truth in addressing issues in an agile manner. “We didn’t have a centralized repository or ability to visualize the data. We could not drive any real decisions from the data because we didn’t know if we were looking at the right metric or how data correlated,” says Muhammad Shahzad, chief financial officer. He says the company was primarily relying on consumption of data via spreadsheet with insufficient collaboration around the data. This stood in the way of the company’s ability to address social insights in an agile manner, and to gain an accurate perspective on cost of acquisition of new subscriptions.

The Honest Company uses social media to interact with subscribers and provide incentives on their offerings. With the speed of social can come great opportunities to shift strategies, and heighten customer satisfaction, but it requires a tool set that facilitates real-time decision making. If a promotion isn’t working on one channel, you want to be able to change tactics as quickly as possible. The Honest Company was concerned that it was missing these types of opportunities due to the lack of timeliness of insights that would influence such decisions.

The company also wanted a deeper understanding of the costs of acquiring and retaining subscribers, and which tactics help drive efficiencies to reduce costs while maintaining a loyal base. The need for insights included overall cost per subscription, not only year-over-year and month-over-month, but week-over-week. They were also interested in cost fostering new subscriptions based on channels such as social, email and paid search, enabling them to adjust tactics based on a better understanding of performance across these methods.

The company decided to look for a partner to provide the capabilities not only to unify their disparate data, but also put the power in to the hands of decision makers to drive insights in a meaningful, fast and collaborative manner. The Honest Company chose Domo, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner for its modern business management and data analytics platform that takes advantage of the power and flexibility of AWS. It determined that this would provide a beneficial ROI due to the economy of scale the cloud provides, as well as bring a trusted advisor to provide guidance in achieving their desire to modernize the business.

By working with Domo, The Honest Company could unify and migrate their data to be used more efficiently. Once an audit of all data had been performed, it used the appropriate selection of Domo-designed data connectors. These are a library of more than 450 connectors covering virtually all data types that enable access to business data from anywhere, across an entire organization. Once this was achieved, the data structure was uploaded to Domo’s AWS-hosted datacenter, where data analysts can build views and create groups for business users to gain access to their needed data.

The Honest Company realized its vision of making more timely decisions to change tactics across social channels while gaining a deeper understanding of cost per acquisition of their subscriber base. The power to make fast, more accurate decisions in a highly collaborative manner is in the hands of business decision makers. “With Domo, we can transform disaggregated data into easy to understand visuals. Our teams have been able to align around these visuals as a central source of truth. Now, instead of spending time trying to define metrics, we’re empowering people with data and talking about action items,” says Hari Ranganathan, manager of web analytics.

One benefit is the ability to create executive dashboards that show all top line key metrics from top to bottom of the funnel to allow the leadership team to have consistency in how they view the business. “With Domo, our data is transparent and accessible. Instead of waiting for month-end reports, we look at current and relevant data every day to make real-time decisions,” says Jeff Sato, Director of Data Solutions. They have confidence in the validity of data so there are fewer questions as to actions to address marketing decisions. There are no questions as to where the data is coming from and when it was last updated, expediting decisions by eliminating the need to question individual departments about why they took specific actions. Everybody has the data to back up their decisions.

With Domo, The Honest Company can also work together in new ways. “Our solution has stimulated conversation around data and has been tremendously helpful in terms of collaboration and cross-functionality,” says Shahzad. “We now have the ability to pose real-time questions across different floors, departments, organizations, business units and offices. Domo essentially introduced a transparency in dialogue. Rather than having a report where you take a snapshot or see what it is as a static image, we now support collaboration around data in real-time."

The Honest Company can also better identify trends and address them in a collaborative and impactful manner. Says Raganathan, “Across The Honest Company, Domo has empowered us with real-time data and insights. We can spot problems and fix them in real-time instead of waiting for a bad trend to manifest itself. Domo helps us prioritize our projects, forewarns us of impending trends and allows us to focus on improving efficiencies and optimizing the business.”

Learn more about AWS Cloud Data Migration.